Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

ON PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

1913; BMJ; Volume: 2; Issue: 2740 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1136/bmj.2.2740.13

0959-8138

D. Forsyth,

Scientific Research and Philosophical Inquiry

TTHE past few yenrs have been uncommonly fruitful in psychological research of use in clinical practice, more especially in enriching our meagre store of methlods of investigating and treating many of the everyday cases of psychical disorders.It is to one of the most helpful of these methods that these two lectures will be devoted.To begin with, it may be recalled that these disorders have been classified as (1] psycho-neuroses, (2) neuroses, and (3) psychoses.The first named never have any but psychical origiins-perhaps long since passed out of mindand tlleir symptoms are the end links of an unbroken psychological chain stretching back to the starting point.They are, from first to last, exclusively psychical, and can be cured only by tracing the cause and removing it like a foreign body from the mind.With the neuroses, on the -other hand, the primary cause is physical, the symptoms lasting only so long as the cause continues to act, and, needless to say, they cannot be remedied by psychical methods alone; to this group belongs, among others, meurasthenia.Lastly, the psychoses result from toxic influences on the brain matter, the best known being the polyneuritic psychosis (Korsakoff's psychosis) associated -with alcoholic periplheral neuritis.As the psycho-neuroses alone are of interest to us here, the only additional specification that -need be made is that this class is itself -divided into three clinical groups- hysterias, phobies (horrors and uncontrollable fears), and 'obsessions (fixed ideas).With this outline in our minds, it goes without saying that psycho-neuroses are not to be treated without an understanding of psychology, that is, of the science which, *to quote the definition of the term, is concerned with "the nature, functions, and phenomena of the human soul or wmind."The clinician, therefore, w-ho proposes to treat psycho-neurotic patients must base his work on a deeper insight into the human mind than is afforded by the ex- perim-ental psyChology which deals with sensory stimui, motor reactions, and the like.And, in contemplating this departure, he need not hesitate for fear of being drawn into metaphysical or theological speculation; on the con- trary, he will find no occasion to move outside the firm ground of practical medicine.Nevertheless, every new development in science, while its facts are as yet few, stands in need of a working hypothesis to help it to further observations.As to what hypothetical conception of the mechanism of the human mind will best serve psychology in th6 long run opinion is likely to differ, but, thanks to Professor Freud, one is already to band which has proved itself at once a key to the nature of many psychical disorders and a gtuide to their cure.This work of Freud's, or, rather, that part of it on whiC11 is based the clinical method of psycho-analysis, Nvill now be considered, any apparent dogmatism of state- ment in the following account being attributed, it is hoped, to the necessity of compressing a large subject within the 1imits of a lecture.